Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Interesting mind experiment

["Christian M. Cepel" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

What's more fun is reading the 'explanations page'.   People are morons. 
 We are doomed.

There's people who claim to hold PhD's and the like with utterly idiotic 
explanations on that page.  I wonder if these folks later do go on to 
figure it out, or if they always remain puzzled and disgruntled.

I couldn't explain it to my mom until I told  'how about this, break the 
rules, pick all the cards.'  She fought me and fought me, insisting the 
'esp' wouldn't work if she did that.  Finally I convinced her that it 
would, and she wrote them all down.  AMAZINGLY... It worked :)  For fun 
the site designer should 'let it be wrong' once in a great while, just 
to throw people off.  It occurs to me, that the more times people try 
this, the less likely they are to pick up on the secret.  Their short 
term memory and cognitive abilities be come clouded by the earlier 
iterations, and they become more frustrated, and more focused on 'the 
secret' instead of asking themselves reasonable questions.  (My mom's 
not lacking in intelligence btw.  far from it...  she's just very 
adamant about following rules :)

This reminds me of a critical thinking game they had us play in the gym 
in Charter, and I must admit that I failed the test utterly.  To my own 
credit, the test went on for 20 minutes and dozens and dozens of 
iterations before someone picked up on it.

The whole aspect of the critical thinking test was to think outside the 
box defined by the rules given to you by the person administering the 
test.  We were all (15 of us) standing around her as she knelt on the 
floor and arranged 5 or 6 pencils, and told us that the way she did it 
would tell us what number from 0-10 she was thinking of.  The catch was 
that the instructions were worded 'how she did it', not 'how she 
arranged the pencils'.  We went through round after round trying to 'see 
a pattern', or remember earlier arrangements, getting upset with her 
when she repeated an arrangement, and she claimed she was thinking of a 
different number.  We all began to doubt her honesty, when finally, 
after 20 minutes one of our group correctly 'guessed' 3 or 4 correctly 
in a row.

I told you she was leaning over.  She had her knees and toes on the 
floor so that she had to support herself when she leaned forward.  Each 
time she arranged the pencils, she stayed leaning forward, sometimes 
resting her weight on her balled fists, or sometimes a fist and a 
splayed hand, sometimes a splayed hand with a couple of fingers sticking 
out.  Completely natural... Each time she did it, she simply rested 
herself on hands exposing the number of fingers equal to the number she 
was thinking.   It was all in front of us, but due to our preconceptions 
about the directions AND our own faith in our logical abilities to 
figure out 'the trick', we failed to see that there was no trick at all.

A lot of fun.  

 //Christian

Michael wrote:

>I hafta say that I'm impressed. May be a cheap trick but it works pretty
>well.
>
>Peace, Love, Linux
>
>;):):-):):-):):-)8')
>Michael McGlothlin <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
>http://kavlon.org/projects/
>
>On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Jonathan King wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>You might find this interesting:
>>>
>>>http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/esp.html
>>>      
>>>
>>Well, it was certainly amusing.  I confess it took me 3 tries to figure
>>out what the trick was...
>>
>>jking
>>
>>
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-- 

Christian Marcus Cepel              ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
EMAIL:PROTECTED icq:12384980     `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)
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Computer Support Specialist, Sr.  (il),-''  (li),'  ((!.-'
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies, College of Ed,
University of Missouri - Columbia * And the wrens have returned & are
nesting *In the hollow of that oak where his heart once had been *And
he lifts his arms in a blessing *For being born again. --Rich Mullins



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